Maps for Lost Lovers (26 page)

Nothing except the path Suraya has already embarked upon.

The man—her husband—doesn’t have to marry another woman before he can marry her again. Allah’s law is Allah’s law and cannot be questioned.

Shamas sits in one of the yellow chairs with the newspaper and listens to Kaukab. Having just returned from the neighbourhood shops, she is telling him about the various things she has heard from the women out there as she prepares food in the blue kitchen, keeping up a monologue as she moves from cupboard to dresser to counter to oven. On a tablecloth as white as canvas, she arranges the still life of their lunch. A spring or summer meal is nothing without the freshly beaten coriander-chilli-and-mint chutney, so she had gone to the shops to pick up the mint and the coriander—bushels of the freshest imaginable green secured by stationery-shop rubber bands—and the chillies in polythene bags so finely thin they failed to rustle. She also brought limes that had scars on the peel, made by the sampling pecks of birds, indicating that the fruit had grown on the outside of the tree crown and had therefore been exposed to more sunlight than the ones that had grown concealed within the canopy, the ones with undamaged skins. She halved a lime and rubbed one piece on the plates they would eat out of, to impart a note of zest into each mouthful, and squeezed the other half over the salad of sliced onions and then coated each slice with fiery black pepper so that every curving piece would become as lethal as a sword in the hand of a drunkard.

Mangoes the colour of copper pots have arrived in the shop, she says, £3.60 for a box of five, as have guavas whose flashing pink insides are like a burst of poetry and the red pears which everyone is always reluctant to peel because you want to eat that
colour,
wishing eyes had tastebuds.

A woman in the neighbourhood has received a letter from the wife of the Bengali family who used to live in the house next door—before Jugnu bought it because the family had decided to go back after their son had been beaten to death in a racial attack by the whites—and in the letter she says that she was totally devastated to hear that her old neighbours’ daughter Mah-Jabin has cut short her lovely long hair.

The Indian and Pakistani mothers of growing daughters are asking the shopkeeper to stop importing a certain English-language women’s magazine published in Bombay. They deem it vulgar and pornographic because in this month’s issue a young Delhi wife had written in to say that she had recently given birth to her first baby and that her husband, saying that her vagina was too loose now, had taken to entering her where she was tighter; the letter was to the medical-advice page and the woman had wanted to know if there was any way she could tighten her vagina, or failing that, perhaps some way could be suggested to make what her husband now does to her not hurt as much.

The parents of a seven-year-old Muslim child—who had recently begun to be educated, at home and at the mosque, about various sins and their punishments—had been summoned to the headmistress’s office yesterday and informed that the boy had been telling his white school-mates that they were all going to be skinned alive in Hell for eating pork and that their mummies and daddies would be set on fire and made to drink boiling hot water because they drank alcohol and did not believe in Allah and Muhammad, peace be upon him.

Someone has heard someone else say that Chanda was pregnant at the time of her murder and that, like Jugnu’s, the foetus’s hands were lumi nous, that they could be seen glowing through Chanda’s stomach and clothing.

Music and talk from the radio tuned to the Asian station accompanies the two of them as they clear the table after lunch. There’s a phone-in about the problems of life in England: . . .
Are you tired of being treated like
a coolie by the whites? Give us a call. We would also like our younger listenersto contact us. Are you in a rage, one of those unemployed, newly bearded,
mosque-going misanthropes they are writing about in the newspapers; the
kind of guy who is either still a virgin or married to a non-English-speaking
first cousin brought over from a village in Pakistan or Bangladesh, the guy
who lives with his parents, hides outside his sister’s school to see if she’s talkingto boys, and thinks she shouldn’t be allowed to go to university. Give us a
call on . . .

He settles down after lunch to look at a local health authority pamphlet that has to be translated into Hindi, Urdu, Bengali and Gujarati—he will do the Urdu. Tuberculosis was thought to have been eradicated in the 1960s and all medical research into it was stopped in the West while it continued to rage elsewhere in the world, but now it is resurfacing in the poorer neighbourhoods (those pockets of the Third World within the First) of London, Liverpool, Glasgow, New York and San Francisco. He remembers the mobile radiography units parked outside mills and factories and the Employment Exchange thirty years ago. The rate of infection was above average in the migrant workers because they had poor nutrition and lived in over-crowded lodgings, one inhaling the germs coughed up by the other. Many of them live in similar conditions even today—over half the houses in this neighbourhood were declared unfit for habitation seven years ago—and they must be warned about the dangers of infection. And the regular trips back to the Subcontinent also expose them and their children to a greater risk.

He works for most of the afternoon, and then walks through a lace of insects to open the bookshop soon after three o’clock, under a sky filled with widely separated white clouds shaped like forest animals. On a wall the graffitied initials of the National Front have been modified by Asian youths so that they now read: NFAK RULES—Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan being the world-renowned Pakistani singer of Sufi devotional lyrics. Beside the path that will convey him to the lake, a day-flying Cinnabar moth flutters away to safety inside the Oxford ragworts. He cannot see the lake yet but the white-paper scraps of the fluttering gulls hint at where it lies ahead.

The thought of Suraya has been with him constantly during the previous hours. As he walks under the blue-and-white forest of the sky, he realizes that he has been standing on knife-blades of impatience all day, waiting for this hour to arrive, even when he was a thousand leagues under concentration, doing the translation an hour earlier. He has been thinking of her, yes, but there has also been the fear that someone had seen her talking to him and that she is even now—somewhere—being harmed for it. This terror has been hurtling around inside him like a grenade with the pin pulled out. From time to time his breast narrows and his strength diminishes.

He unlocks the shop and goes in. The eyes of the deer on the wallpaper shine like little lamps draped with blue veils. The small creatures sit two by two, surrounded by branches of the flame-of-the-forest, the petals curving like the beaks of parakeets.

As he waits for her to walk out of the deserted spaces of the afternoon, the sun striking the lake’s silver at an angle, a part of him hopes she won’t come. He had drawn pleasure by talking to her, and she too had seemed animated several times, but he is too aware of the dangers. He is reminded of an Urdu saying which advocates caution when in the presence of something beautiful or pleasurable: Don’t forget that serpents haunt sandalwood trees.

From the door of the
Safeena,
he sees her arriving, and as she reaches Scandal Point and moves towards him he wishes he hadn’t opened the shop this afternoon too: he is relieved to see that she is safe, but he now suspects that someone (a husband or brother or—after an inch-long story in the inner pages of the Urdu newspaper which said that a middle-aged woman was found with her neck broken in a village outside Lahore—a young nephew) has followed her and is hiding nearby to confirm his suspicions about her.

“I went to the door because I heard a strange musical noise,” he explains to her. “I have heard it all day. Either it is a strange bird or a shop around here has recently stocked a new kind of whistle that is proving very popular with children.” She is wearing a fresh set of
shalwar-kameez
and the same paisley jacket cropped at the waist. He raises his hands to indicate the shelves: “Fiction there. Non-fiction from here to here. Poetry there. And the few books on art there.” And he tells himself to remain silent from now on so she can look around and leave as soon as possible— for her own safety. They say it’s hard to kill a fellow human being.
Don’t
aim at the victim: aim
at something
on
the victim
—
the knot of a tie, a flower
printed on the dress.
Would they aim at one of the paisleys, with its tiny ruby centre, before pulling the trigger, they who had watched her talking to him this morning and have followed her here this afternoon, they who are hiding just outside now?

She picks up the large mustard-yellow
Muraqqa-e-Chughtai
from the shelf—a volume of the Mughul Urdu poet Ghalib’s verse illustrated with paintings by Abdur Rahman Chughtai—and says quietly, “Oh, you have this.”

“Yes. Originally published in 19 . . . 28. There is
Naqsh-e-Chughtai
beside it—same text but different paintings, from 19 . . . 34.” He remains in his chair, telling himself not to draw close to her: between them lies a fragile bridge of glass. “Can you see it? The dust-jacket is grey and shows a deer sitting beside a small cypress tree growing out of a jewel.” He must try to remain quiet and not point out any more books to her. She moves along the shelves of Urdu and Persian poetry, opening and closing the volumes, and after a while says to him,

“A lot of Persian poems are about flowers and spring.”

“Yes. My younger brother visited Iran some years ago, and he said that the abundantly flowered arrival of spring in that country cannot fail to inspire even a casual observer. I personally think that it would be difficult to find more rapturous descriptions of spring than those in the poetry of Qani.”

“Is that the brother who . . . was . . . murdered?” She looks down at the floor.

“Yes, and I am sorry once again for revealing that to you so clumsily earlier.”

“Please think nothing of it. May I ask how it happened?”

He doesn’t want to distress her. “I’d rather not talk about it.”

“I understand.” She turns to the shelf and gives herself over to the books.

He looks at the afternoon. “I think I saw the butterfly I have been chasing fly in here,” Jugnu said—once, when both he and the bookshop’s owner were still here. Out of breath, he’d come into the
Safeena
holding his green long-handled butterfly net like a flag. Shamas had pointed to the Urdu translation of
Madame Bovary
on the shelf and said: “The only butterflies in here are the ones in there.” Jugnu went out to continue his search, but he returned to the
Safeena
later and picked up
Madame
Bovary:
“Now. I do remember that there are butterflies in here. Three, I think—the first black, the second yellow and the third white.” And five minutes of turning the pages later he announced: “Yes, they are still here.”

Shamas turns his attention to Suraya again. He feels she may have taken his last comment as a rebuke, but he cannot think of how to make amends: she’s perusing the books, head bowed, her back turned to him determinedly. Shamas shifts his gaze and fixes it on her so that their eyes would have to meet even if she slightly alters the position of her head. He smiles at her when that happens—as though making up with a lover after a fight—and nonchalantly points to her Kashmiri jacket:

“Do you know why paisley is so linked with Kashmir? No? Imagine two lovers quarrelling in that region. Her footsteps formed paisleys when she hurried away from him in distress. He searched for her forlornly in the forest glades where luminous orchids arose from the”—it is too late for him to stop—“spilled semen of mating animals and birds, where the urge for existence forced creepers and vines towards faraway chinks of sunlight, where the branches quivered with living songs and at sunset the sky turned red as though the departing sun had heaped rubies on the day’s shroud. And it was the paisleys imprinted amid the low flowers that eventually led him to her. He was the god Shiva, she the goddess Parvati, and when he found her he commemorated their union by carving the Jehlum river as it flowed—and still flows—through the valley of Kashmir in the shape of a paisley.”

“Thank you,” her eyes dance as she smiles. “That is beautiful.”

And, buoyed by her smile, he indicates the Chughtai books in her hand and says: “Chughtai drew the jacket design for my book of poems, back in the 1950s.”

“You published a book?” She’s electrified and almost gasps. “And
Chughtai
?”

“He was a great friend to the Lahore publishing world.” He looks at her. “And as for my book: it was ready for publication but nothing came of it.”

“Why? Do you have the poems in a notebook, perhaps? I’d like to read them.”

“No, there is no copy of the manuscript. My wife had the only copy but that was . . . destroyed. And I am not sure whether I remember them accurately myself anymore.” He pictures himself laying out Kaukab’s wedding dress and writing out the verses in a notebook—in a
safeena
!—for Suraya to read; but, of course the wedding dress was reduced to ashes all those years ago.

“You must try to remember them,” she says, and adds with a smile: “Some day I’ll come to the
Safeena
and ask you to recite for me, like Wamaq Saleem. The only difference being that ours would be a private reading, for one.” She approaches him with the two volumes by Chughtai, holding them in the crook of her arm like a college girl. “I’ll take these. I looked for them in Pakistan but the village where I was didn’t have a very well-stocked bookshop, as you can imagine.”

“What were you doing in Pakistan?” Her hair is secured by the length of silk he had retrieved for her yesterday: at lunch the red insides of a Moroccan blood orange—one of those fruits that always produce intensely scented urine—had reminded him of the colour of the scarf.